"The time has come," the Walrus said, "To talk of many things."

I recently ran out of new books on my iPhone, and ended up casually re-reading Crusade, a far-future military space opera by David Weber and Steve White*, while I was waiting to have some blood work done.

In Crusade, the Terran Federation is finally at peace, after forming an alliance with their former enemies the catlike Orions.  However, the peace is unexpectedly shattered by an assault on the Federation's borders by mysterious aliens who worship Holy Mother Terra as a religious mecca, and who are determined to free it from the perceived control of the satanic Orions.

The element of surprise allows them to sweep through the network of warp gates linking the myriad star systems that compose the Federation virtually unopposed.  One of the human colonies that they capture is New Hebrides, but a strong guerilla resistance prevents them from completely securing the planet.  

Frustrated and angered by the continued resistance of a people that should be welcoming them as liberators, two of the alien invaders have the following exchange:

Hold on: "Lantu ran the tip of a letter-opener over the map"?

A letter-opener?

What an odd choice of props!  If the author had chosen a writing stylus, a bayonet, some kind of alien eating utensil, anything else, even a finger, I would have passed over that sentence and never thought about it.  But a letter-opener?

A letter-opener is a very specific item.  Letter-openers posit a myriad of societal elements: a tradition of formalized message delivery; envelopes - specifically sealed envelopes that require confidentiality, backed up by notions of privacy and authority; and the idea of letters themself, for that matter, suggesting a deskbound bureaucratic system that relies on physical notification.  And, given that the aliens exist in a highly technological environment, letters (and letter-openers) are an astonishing anachronism.  

To be fair, the society in question has been contaminated by the arrival of a fugitive Terran colony ship, but why would that contamination extend to such an archaic phenomenon?  Ignoring the future setting for a moment, I suspect that contemporary society contains a lot less letter-openers than it did 50 years ago. 

I realize that the authors probably selected a letter-opener without really thinking about it, which is a shame.  Storytelling is a kind of shared illusion, and sometimes it doesn't take very much to break that illusion - I can't remember the name of the planet that the aliens come from, but it will be a long time before I forget that letter-opener.

- Sid

* It's not the first time that Weber and White have come under scrutiny here.